With the advent of integrated electronics, electrical circuits have largely eliminated mechanical and electromechanical features in many applications, reducing the maintenance and adjustment chores associated with such applications. However, these electrical circuits as well as the mechanical aspects of the circuit housing, attachment points, and so on, may still occasionally require maintenance, adjustment, or even replacement. For example, power circuits may be exposed to excess heat and may be degraded. Vibration and other mechanical forces may affect the circuits and/or their housings or their connections to other circuit elements.
However, due to the relative permanence of integrated circuit assemblies, these assemblies are not often configured for easy disassembly, and disassembly may even require removal of one or more components from a board of the assembly. For example it is often advantageous to affix certain components to a housing or other nearby structure for purposes of heat transfer, mechanical support, and so on. However, by joining the board and housing in a semi-permanent manner, this practice can render one side of the board inaccessible, requiring removal of components to allow the remainder of the board to be accessed for inspection and repair. In such cases, the board no longer presents a fully functional device and it becomes difficult to test the remaining components.
Most of the testing solutions available today are directed to the testing of new boards being assembled rather than the testing of completed boards being disassembled for reconditioning, and thus are less than ideal for use in the context of remanufacturing and repair. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,486,686 to Fukasawa describes a bare-chip LSI mounting board test apparatus for testing a single chip (LSI) mounted on a board prior to mounting other components. The Fukasawa tester boards incorporate all other parts that will eventually be used on the LSI board and are interfaced to the LSI board via probes. In this state, a test signal is transmitted from a controller through the test boards to the LSI board to test the mounted LSI chip. However, this system requires that the board under test contain only a single chip (the LSI) which is generally not the case in the context of partial disassembly for remanufacture. In addition, rather than allowing the board under test to interface as it normally would, the board is forced to interface indirectly through the Fukasawa test boards, increasing complexity in the fixture and allowing additional avenues for inadvertent error.